The Marketing Principle of “Loose Ties” and How it can Jump-Start Your Referrals…
In Malcolm Gladwell’s best selling book, The Tipping Point, he talked about the concept of “loose ties.”
Since it has been a while since I’ve read the book I will not even attempt to paraphrase this amazing writer at all. However, I will give you the simple secret to adapting the concept of loose ties to help you grow your business.
If you think about it, how many actual friends, in the true sense of the word, do you have? Most people only have a few. You know the ones, that’ll carry your casket if they are still around. But we all have a ton of “loose ties.” These are, acquaintances business associates as well as business acquaintances. Loose ties can be neighbors that come over just a few times a year. A loose tie can be someone who you sit on a town board with. The main problem is this…
Most sales training courses/ marketing “gurus” really only talk about getting “referrals” from “friends” of your happy clients and customers. What happens is the client or customer searches their short list of friends and comes up empty. Let me give you some real life examples…
An owner of really state of the art health club once contacted me for help with his marketing. On my initial consult with him I discovered he had some sports conditioning equipment. Let’s say I happened to be a member of his gym. If he asked me if I had any “friends” who were looking for sports conditioning because they were training for an event or something, my subconscious would have done a search and came up empty. But, when I put my marketing hat on and really thought about who would benefit from this type of service I immediately thought of a very lose tie business associate. He was signed up to play Hockey with the New York Rangers, as part of a charity fund-raiser. He once posted on his face book page that he was “getting ready and in training” for this once in a life time thing.
I recently sat down with a very high end investment adviser. He shared with me how getting “referrals” seemed almost impossible. I agreed! If he tries getting referrals the “traditional” way it’d be like trying to push a rope. So we discussed strategies to find his client’s loose ties and then begin to narrow them down to the ones that could use his services.
The main take away is this…
Don’t ask your clients and customers to “refer” their friends. Take more time and discover who their loose ties are. Why limit yourself to a handful of “friends” when you can tap into 100′s of loose ties.
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